While I’m here in Phoenix, I wanted to visit the Heard Museum. My brother was busy elsewhere, and while it’s less than two miles away, temperatures were already at triple digits by 9:00am. I decided to try taking a Waymo.
I downloaded the Waymo app, but it refused to run. Since it’s an Alphabet company, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that they use the hated Google Play Integrity API. Play Integrity is what’s known as a “remote attestation” system, which generally amounts to a way that a vendor can make sure that your computer works for them, not necessarily for you. So purveyors of really sensitive apps (banking, cryptocurrency…) might want to check that your phone OS hasn’t been compromised. Unfortunately, Play Integrity misses the mark and allows the use of badly flawed versions of Android, and largely just serves to make sure that your phone uses restrictively Google-licensed software that mostly exists to collect surveillance data and serve ads. Android is ostensibly open-source software, so it’s possible to remove all the Google surveillance and ad-serving junkware and actually have a phone that honors you, the user, but if an app requires Play Integrity then it will refuse to run on your privacy-respecting device.
So I was disappointed, but not surprised, to find that the Waymo app refused to run on my GrapheneOS-equipped phone. I poked around a bit, though, and discovered that if you just block access to the Play Integrity API, the app will run anyway. It was probably refusing to run on some old, outmoded, insecure versions of Android (the world is rife with ‘em) so Waymo decided not to enforce the Integrity attestation if the phone didn’t support it. For now, then, you can still run Waymo on a GrapheneOS phone by going to Settings>Apps>Waymo>Play Integrity API and turn on “Block usage attempts.”
People say their first ride can be “weird” or “scary” because there’s an empty driver seat. That didn’t bother me, but what I did find strange was just that there was nobody to greet when I got in and left the vehicle. It’s like these little voices in my head kept saying “be polite, be friendly” but there wasn’t anybody to be friendly to.
It was otherwise an uneventful trip. I really enjoyed the Heard (a column for another time, perhaps) and was grateful for the air-conditioned Waymo that picked me up in the 110° heat when I was ready to return home.
Oh, another weirdness is that there’s no driver to tip when your ride is finished.
—2p